The gun wasn't needed to control any of his clients. They knew he had balls. Anybody who was prepared to get into a confined space with a half-ton bull was not lacking in that department. And he still had the reflexes. No, the gun had become necessary because, although he was now receiving high-quality product from the Russians, he hadn't stopped selling the gear that he was getting from the Italians. In fact, he'd started cutting the one with the other. So, not only was there the potential for trouble from outsiders interested in money, but there was also an element of unpredictability in his suppliers.
Now, when he handed over his €10,000 for the week, he was never quite sure whether he was going to be given another package to sell or find himself hanging out of the window upside down, with a four-floor drop beneath him. It had already happened once. The weightlifter, the one called Nikita, had dropped by to remind him that his supply was exclusive and if he didn't like the arrangement they'd install their own dealer. Four floors to a concrete pavement had been Nikita's way of trying to make him see reason. He hadn't enjoyed the adrenaline rush.
Fucking Russians. This had never been a friendly business. Dealing in death was never going to be that. But the Italians spoke his language, and he didn't know how long the Russian product was going to last. So he was going to play this tricky game until things got a little clearer, and that's why he was tooled up.
His girlfriend sighed in her sleep. He shut the bedroom door and looked around the living room. He moved the table to a more central position between the window and the wall, on which hung an oblong mirror. With a screwdriver he put a five-centimetre screw in the centre of the table. He eased the safety off the gun and positioned it so that the trigger rested against the screw and the barrel pointed to the right of the mirror. He inserted another couple of screws to maintain the line of the barrel. He placed a copy of 6 Toros magazine over the handgun. He put a chair by the table which, when he sat on it, would leave his good right arm free and his poor left arm close to the gun. He sat and checked the view he got from the mirror. It gave him angles on the two corners of the room behind him. He dropped the blinds on the window, shut out the sunlight and the view of the busy Carretera de Su Eminencia. He didn't bother with any other chairs. The supplier, with his Cuban translator, never sat down. They did smoke, even though they knew he didn't like it. He was the drug dealer with one lung who didn't smoke, didn't drink and didn't do drugs. El Pulmon breathed in slowly, the way he'd always done to control his fear. Ramirez was standing at the window in Falcon's office, looking out. Ferrera was at her computer.
'I've had the three mystery men in the Russian's disks identified,' said Falcon. 'The guy with Margarita is Juan Valverde, the boss of I4IT Europe in Madrid. The American is Charles Taggart, an ex-TV preacher, who's an I4IT consultant, reporting back to the owner, Cortland Fallenbach. The last guy is Antonio Ramos, who is an engineer and the new director of Horizonte's construction division. I want you to find out where those three men are, because I want to talk to them as soon as possible.'
Cristina Ferrera nodded. Falcon went through to join Ramirez in his office, gave him the intelligence he'd learned from Pablo about the renegade Russian gang set up by Yuri Donstov in Seville. Ramirez said he'd put detectives Serrano and Baena on a door-to-door, starting in Calle Garlopa in Seville Este, which was the address they'd found in the GPS of Vasili Lukyanov's Range Rover. They moved on to other matters.
'The blood on both those paper suits we found in the rubbish bins on Calle Feria has been confirmed as a perfect match to Marisa Moreno,' said Ramirez.
'Anything on the inside of them?' asked Falcon.
'Both the hoods contained hairs, and we've picked up some sweat patches from the suits,' said Ramirez. 'One of them even had a semen deposit.'
'Sweat patches? Semen? Was he naked underneath this suit?'
'Not if he stripped it off, walked round the corner to Calle Gerona and stuck it in the bin,' said Ramirez. 'But it was a hot night, maybe they had a car.'
'Gangsters driving around in their underpants?' said Falcon, making for the door.
'Where are you going?' asked Ramirez. 'You've only just got here.'
'To talk to Esteban Calderon.'
'The judge on the Marisa Moreno case is going to want to see us at some stage,' said Ramirez. 'It's the new guy: Anibal Parrado. He's all right. How's Consuelo holding up?'
'She's not all right,' said Falcon. 'We're not all right.'
'So you told her about Marisa and the threatening phone calls.'
'And she remembered those Russians breaking into her house four years ago, putting a red cross over a family photograph.'
'I'm sorry,' said Ramirez. 'I wasn't thinking when I told you about the semen deposit. That's not a nice thing to know… I mean, given Dario's situation.'
'I have to know,' said Falcon. 'Give me a call when you get the full forensics. Let's get the DNA on the semen deposit to Vicente Cortes and Martin Diaz. They can see if it matches DNA on the GRECO and CICO databases from any Russians they've had in custody. And get everybody in the squad to remember that this is all connected: the Seville bombing, the murder of Ines, the cutting up of Marisa and the kidnapping of Dario.'
'The only problem,' said Ramirez, fingers exploding up into the air, 'is evidence.' Today was delivery day, but he wasn't sure when the Russian was going to turn up. All he knew was that he had four hundred grams of Italian left, which wasn't going to satisfy those of his clients who were already coming out of their dens all twitchy and gabbling, with the first sweats and that clawing and gnawing in the blood. They'd be looking for his boys on the streets, the sign that the Russian product had arrived and that all would soon be well.
El Pulmon checked on Julia. Still asleep. Should he wake her? Get her up and out before the guys came? He shrugged; it seemed a shame. Softly, he closed the door. She could sleep all day, that one. He had to keep an eye on her, though, make sure she wasn't sampling the product. He sat down. Breathed slowly, got the fear crouched down low in his stomach. He was always scared these days, what with the money getting bigger and these Russians being so unreadable.
Maybe he should wake Julia. Keep calm, just the nerves talking. Keep the fear. He knew he needed the fear, but it had to be where he wanted it. Low in the stomach, not all up his throat and over his head. He'd seen that with novilleros facing their first full-size bull. The fear that paralysed and got you killed.
The knock came at 12.45 p.m. First man in was the Cuban translator. Behind him was the weightlifter – head shaved with just a dusting of black showing through the white skin, nose slightly flattened, one cheekbone with a red scar. He was smaller than El Pulmon, but twice his width. His arms were very hairy and were covered in indiscernible tattoos. His legs moved as if he had animals up his trousers. El Pulmon led them into the room, felt their eyes searching his back, took his seat by the table. The Cuban stood to the left of the mirror. The weightlifter kept his back to the wall, moved to the right of the mirror and had a good, long look around with his dark, deep-set eyes. El Pulmon didn't like it. He knew now that the Russian was carrying a gun in the small of his back. He wished he'd woken Julia. He had the roll of money in his shirt, but he didn't take it out. He could feel some questions backed up against the wall over there.
'He wants to know if you're still buying from the Italians?' asked the Cuban.
'No, I told you I'd stopped.'
'Take a look,' said the Cuban, giving him a twist of silver foil.
El Pulmon opened it up, saw the white powder, knew that he was in trouble. He shrugged.
'Where did you get this?' he asked.
'We bought it from one of your clients,' said the Cuban. 'Paid eighty euros for it.'
'I don't know what the problem is.'
'It's our product cut with the Italian shit you told us you'd stopped moving.'
'I still have some Italian product left. I didn't want to just throw it away.'
'You buy from the Italians,' said the w
eightlifter, his first words in rough, accented Spanish.
'I didn't know you spoke Spanish,' said El Pulmon, taking the opportunity for a bit of distraction.
'He knows you're still buying from them,' said the Cuban.
'How does he know that?'
'One of your clients told us.'
'Which one?' asked El Pulmon. 'They're all junkies out there. They'll do and say anything for a fix.'
'The flamenco singer.'
'Carlos Puerta is hardly reliable,' said El Pulmon. 'He's been looking to fuck me up since his girlfriend moved in with me.'
'That's why we kept an eye on your place, to see the Italians for ourselves,' said the Cuban, who'd moved to the window and was peering through the blinds.
El Pulmon looked at the Russian and kept an eye on the Cuban through the mirror.
'We tell you the last time,' said the weightlifter.
The Cuban came away from the window. He had a large hunting knife in his hand. He went to grab El Pulmon by the hair. El Pulmon leaned forward and slapped the copy of 6 Toros. The roar of the gunshot filled the room and El Pulmon's blade sprang into his hand. He kept low and swung round, driving the narrow length of steel into the Cuban's left side. He heard nothing with the gunshot ringing in his ears, but he felt the Cuban's body stiffen. As he drove the blade in, he grabbed the Cuban's right wrist with the hunting knife in it and whirled the man round so that he ended up between El Pulmon and the weightlifter, who was now on the floor, lying on his back, arm extended, gun in hand. Another head-ringing bang inside the four hard walls of the apartment and the Cuban's rigid body leapt and jerked. El Pulmon forced him backwards on to another spine-rupturing explosion. He dropped his shoulder and shoved the Cuban at the Russian, who grunted under the weight and El Pulmon, still with his blade, was out of the door, down the stairs and on the other side of the garages before he remembered Julia, asleep in the bedroom. There was a taxi waiting in the prison car park, engine running, air-con roaring, cabbie asleep, head thrown back, mouth open. As Falcon went up the path to the prison reception he took a call on his mobile from his old detective friend in Madrid, calling him about the apartment in La Latina where he'd met Yacoub.
'It's not privately owned,' he said. 'The whole block belongs to the Middle East European Investment Corporation, based in Dubai.'
'Was that apartment rented out to anyone?' 'It's one of three in the block that's empty.' Falcon hung up, found Alicia with her serene white face, red lipstick under a jet-black bob, waiting patiently in the reception area. He greeted her. They kissed. She squeezed his shoulder, happy to hear his voice. He told her about her taxi.
'I've been sitting here for twenty minutes,' she said, annoyed. 'What's the matter with these people?'
'He's a taxi driver from Seville,' said Falcon. 'It's their nature.'
'How are you?' she asked.
'Complicated,' he said.
'That seems to be the default setting for people our age,' she said.
Falcon told her that Consuelo's youngest son had been abducted and the effect on their relationship. Alicia was shocked, said she'd call her straight away.
'She must be going crazy.'
'Don't speak to her on my behalf,' said Falcon.
'Of course not.'
He walked her to her cab, the heat cracked down on their heads. He opened the cab door for her, showed the cabbie his police card, pointed at his meter with a long hard stare. The cabbie zeroed it, pulled away. When the guards first brought Calderon into the room made available to them by the prison governor, he looked so shattered Falcon thought he might send him straight back to his cell. The guards got him seated and left the room. Calderon ransacked his pockets for cigarettes, lit up, sucked in a huge drag, swayed in his chair.
'What brings you here, Javier?' he asked.
'Are you all right, Esteban? You look…'
'Bedraggled? Crazy? Fucked up?' said Calderon. 'Take your pick. I'm all of them. You know, I hadn't really understood it before, but there's nowhere to hide in psycho… you wouldn't call it therapy, exactly, would you? It's more like… extraction. Psycho-extraction. Yanking rotten memories from the brain.'
'I just saw Alicia in the car park.'
'She doesn't give much away, that one,' said Calderon. 'I reckon psychoanalysis is no different to poker, except that nobody knows what cards they have. Did she say anything interesting?'
'Nothing about you. She's very discreet. She didn't even tell me why she was here,' said Falcon. 'Maybe you shouldn't look at it as extraction, Esteban. You can't extract memories, nor can you hide from them without consequences. You just illuminate them.'
'Thanks for that, Javier,' said Calderon, dismissively. 'I'll see if that makes it any less painful. Doctora Aguado asked me what I wanted from our sessions. I said I wanted to know if I'd killed Ines. It's interesting. She's no different to a lawyer making a case. She starts with a premise – Esteban Calderon hates women. Me – can you believe it? Then she starts wheedling the usual shit out of me about how I despise my stupid mother and how I fucked up a girlfriend who didn't like my poems.'
'Your poems?'
'I wanted to be a writer, Javier,' he said, holding up his hand. 'It's all a long time ago and I'm not going into it. What are you doing here?'
'We're getting somewhere on Ines's murder,' said Falcon. 'But we've also hit a brick wall.'
'Come on, Javier. Don't talk shit to me.'
'I've been working on Marisa.'
'That sounds like the wet-towel treatment.'
'It probably was something like that for her and she's been getting it from all sides,' said Falcon, and went on to tell him about finding the footage of Margarita, the threatening phone calls and the kidnapping of Dario.
'You keep your inner turmoil better hidden than I do, Javier.'
'Practice,' said Falcon. 'Anyway, I sent Cristina Ferrera to talk to Marisa, and while intoxicated she pretty well admitted that she'd been coerced to start a relationship with you.'
'By whom?'
'The people holding her sister. A Russian mafia group.'
Calderon smoked intensely, staring at the floor.
'What I need to know from you, Esteban, is how you met Marisa,' said Falcon. 'Who effected that introduction?'
Silence for a moment while Calderon leaned back in his chair, eyes narrowed.
'She's dead, isn't she?' he said. 'You've come to me because she can't tell you any more.'
'She was murdered last night,' said Falcon. 'I'm sorry, Esteban.'
Calderon leaned across the table, looking up into Falcon's head.
'What are you sorry about, Javier?' he asked, tapping his own chest. 'Are you sorry for me, because you think I loved her and she was just fucking me under orders?'
'I'm sorry because she was a woman in an impossible position, under immense strain, whose only thought was for the safety of her own sister,' said Falcon. 'That's why she didn't talk to us. A singular, but very compelling reason.'
That did something to Calderon's equilibrium. He even wobbled in his chair and had to anchor himself with his hands flat on the table. Emotion rose in his chest. And maybe it was because this conversation had come hard on the heels of his session with Alicia Aguado that he managed to see beyond his own self-interest and realize that sitting before him was a man with a completely different moral centre to his own.
'You've forgiven her, haven't you, Javier?' he said. 'You now know that Marisa was in some way involved in Ines's murder, and yet…'
'It would be very helpful if you could remember who introduced you to Marisa,' said Falcon.
'Does this mean,' said Calderon, blinking back the tears, 'that I didn't do it?'
'It means that Cristina Ferrera thought that Marisa, who was drunk at the time, had been coerced into consorting with you,' said Falcon. 'Marisa never admitted that it was the Russians who'd forced her. We have no signed statement and no recording of the conversation. There's no new evidence. We have, however, lost
Marisa. Her words will never be heard. We have to go back to an earlier level of involvement, which means finding out how she met you. Were you introduced?'
Falcon could see quite clearly that Calderon did remember. He was staring at a point above Falcon's head and running his thumbnail up and down between his front teeth, weighing something up; and whatever it was it had weight.
'It was at a garden party at the Duchess of Alba's house,' said Calderon. 'Marisa was introduced to me by my cousin.'
'Your cousin?'
'That is the son of the Juez Decano de Sevilla,' said Calderon. 'Alejandro Spinola. He works in the mayor's office.'
15
Outskirts of Seville – Monday, 18th September 2006, 13.30 hrs
On the way back from the prison, Falcon got the call.
'Two officers from the Narcotics squad in Las Tres Mil just called in a double murder in the apartment of a drug dealer called Roque Barba, also known as El Pulmon,' said the operator. 'A Cuban male called Miguel Estevez found in the living room, shot twice in the back and stabbed in the side, and a Spanish female, Julia Valdes, believed to be El Pulmon's girlfriend, found in the bedroom shot in the face.'
Falcon came off the motorway and on to the ring road. He took the exit before the golf club and joined the Carretera de Su Eminencia, a road he'd always thought ridiculously named, given that it enclosed one of the grimmest public housing projects in Seville.
In the 1960s and 70s the municipality had lured gypsies from the centre of town out to this development of residential blocks on the edge of civilization. Years of poverty, lack of community and self-respect had transformed a halfhearted attempt at social engineering into a neighbourhood of drugs, murder, theft and vandalism. This did not mean that the barrio was without soul. Some of the greatest flamenco voices came from here, and quite a few of them had done time in the prison he'd just come from. It was more that the soul was not evident from the bare, treeless landscape, the grimy concrete blocks, the cheap clothes hanging out to dry on metal bars over the windows and landings, the rubbish collecting in the basements and stairwells, the graffiti and the air of complete desolation that told anyone who was in any doubt that these were forgotten people in a place that had fallen off the back of the town hall's mind.
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